Ext2 Filesystems Utilities

File Release Notes and Changelog

Release Name: 1.40.3

Notes:
E2fsprogs 1.40.3 (December 5, 2007)
===================================

Fix a potential security vulnerability where an untrusted filesystem
can be corrupted in such a way that a program using libext2fs will
allocate a buffer which is far too small.  This can lead to either a
crash or potentially a heap-based buffer overflow crash.  No known
exploits exist, but main concern is where an untrusted user who
possesses privileged access in a guest Xen environment could corrupt a
filesystem which is then accessed by the pygrub program, running as
root in the dom0 host environment, thus allowing the untrusted user to
gain privileged access in the host OS.  Thanks to the McAfee AVERT
Research group for reporting this issue.  (Addresses CVE-2007-5497.)

Fix hueristics in blkid which could cause a disk without partitions to
be incorrectly skipped when a loopback device is present.  (Addresses
Red Hat Bugzilla #400321.)

Fix e2image so that in raw mode it does not create an image file which
is one byte too large.

Change mke2fs's usage message so it recommends the preferred -E option
instead of the deprecated -R option.

Enhance the blkid library so it will recognize squashfs filesystems.
(Addresses Red Hat Bugzilla #305151.)

Enhance e2fsck so it will force the backup superblocks to be backed up
if the filesystem is consistent and key constants have been changed
(i.e., by an on-line resize) or by e2fsck in the course of its
operations.

Enhance blkid's detection of FAT filesystems; so that USB disks with
only a single bootable partition will not get missed.

E2fsck will no longer mark a filesystem as invalid if it has time
errors (i.e., if superblock mount time or last write time is in the
future) and the user refuses to fix the problem.

The Ubuntu init scripts don't properly set the system time correctly
from hardware clock if the hardware clock is configured to tick local
time instead of GMT time.  Work around this as best as we can by
providing an option, buggy_init_scripts, in /etc/e2fsck.conf which can
be set on Ubuntu systems.  (Addresses Debian Bug #441093, and Ubuntu
Bug #131201.)

Fix fsck to ignore /etc/fstab entries for bind mounts.  (Addresses Red
Hat Bugzilla #151533.)

Fix e2fsck so that if the superblock is corrupt, but still looks
vaguely like an ext2/3/4 superblock, that it automatically tries to
fall back to the backup superblock, instead of failing with a hard
error.

Make the e2fsprogs program more robust so that they will not crash
when opening a corrupt filesystem where s_inode_size is zero.

Change e2fsck so it uses sscanf() instead of atoi() so it non-numeric
arguments are detected as such and the parse error is reported to the
user.   (Addresses Debian Bug #435381.)

Change e2fsck so it will not complain if a file has blocks reallocated
up to the next multiple of a system's page size.

Fix bug in ext2fs_check_desc() which will cause e2fsck to complain
about (valid) filesystems where the inode table extends to the last
block of the block group.  (Addresses Red Hat Bugzilla #214765.)

Fix a bug in ext2fs_initialize() which causes mke2fs to fail while
allocating inode tables for some relatively rare odd disk sizes.
(Addresses Red Hat Bugzilla #241767.)

Add Catalan translation and update Dutch and Swedish translations
from the Translation Project.

Fix big-endian byte-swapping bug in ext2fs_swap_inode_full().  We
still had an issue when trying to figure out whether we need to
byte-swap fast symlinks that contained extended attributes.

Fixed spelling mistakes, typos, and otherwise clarified man pages.
(Addresses SourceForge Bug #1821333.)


Programmer's Notes:
-------------------

Fix mke2fs tests to avoid needing any significant ^M (CR) characters

Add "make check" to the RPM spec file

Fix "make install" and 'make unstall" in misc/Makefile.in so that it
works correctly when the prefix is not the root directory.

Fix the resize2fs tests, r_move_itable and r_resize_inode, so they
clena up after themselves by deleting the test.img temporary file
after completing the test.

Fixed a corner case bug ext2fs_unlink() when trying to delete the
first directory entry in a directory block and the last directory
entry in the previous directory block is not in use.  Fortunately
ext2fs_unlink() is only used by debugfs and e2fsck, and in e2fsck in
places where it is extremely unlikely to run into this corner case.

Fix missing dependency which would cuase parallel builds to fail.
(Addresses Sourceforge Bug #1842331.)

Fix a build error on newer gcc caused by lib/ext2fs/ismounted.c
calling open(O_CREATE) with a missing mode parameter.

Fix the test_ss.c in lib/ss so it can be used as an example
application program for the library as well as a regression test
suite.

Fix ext2fs_dblist_dir_iterate() so that error codes and abort codes
are properly passed back up through the call stack.


Changes: